Oracle Blog

Saturday Dec 23, 2006

There was an announcement yesterday that may seem uninteresting to those of us in the English-speaking world, but which could have profound impacts elsewhere. One of the key attributes of the OpenOffice.org community is that, while there is a core group of developers doing an excellent job evolving the productivity suite, there is a huge international community making sure that OpenOffice.org is localised globally.

The most important feature of the community is that it provides speakers of 100 different languages and dialects with an office productivity suite in their own language. That's an achievement that the supposed market leader can only dream about - and it makes ISO 26300 ODF all the more valuable as an international standard. The truly world-changing aspect of Free and Open Source software is that everyone can have it in their own language because local people are free to localise it. More than that, because the work is done locally, it can be within an appropriate cultural frame, rather than carrying with it the linguistic prejudices of a foreign company.

So to that announcement. I am delighted to be able to say that Sun has just contributed the Globalisation source code for the Solaris operating system to the OpenSolaris community under CDDL, so that everyone everywhere in the world can have OpenSolaris-based operating systems in their own language and cultural frame. Starting the community was a huge step; this move could prove to have an even greater impact. Congratulations to the team!